Stanford and Cal: Different problems, same outlook

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 30, 1998

LET'S BE honest. Nobody here asked for the Freedom Bowl, nobody here cares about the Freedom Bowl, and if history is any judge, nobody is going to make any great effort to see the Freedom Bowl.

But desperate times call for, well, a bowl game, even if it is one that couldn't make it in Anaheim.

Still, it is one more sign that our few remaining college football teams are aware of their dwindling position in our windshields, and are working every available angle short of overt grade-fixing to regain elbow room. At Cal and Stanford, your 1998 season-ticket purchase also gets you a cell phone, which is what colleges resort to when they don't have the initiative to violate NCAA rules, recruit academic failures or resort to point-shaving to hold the audience.

This indeed figures to be a very difficult year for our heroes. The great argument Cal and Stanford are expected to settle is whether the winner of the Big Game finishes seventh, eighth or ninth. At San Jose State, the conundrum is even more fundamental, since only the smallest fraction of its fan base knows the other members of their conference.

Indeed, if the oxymoronic "preseason experts" are on their J's, we are about to endure perhaps the worst single year in modern Bay Area football history. Stanford is coming off a disappointing 5-6 season with most of the impact players heading off for pro football, pro baseball and pro arbitrage. One magazine referred to the place as

Cal last weighed in at 3-8, plays Nebraska for no readily understandable reason, and already has had three nose guards quit this month alone. The big news is the ongoing construction of the new basketball arena, which is mostly bad news for the football team.

And SJS? After a 4-7 year, the Spartans lost one of their best players to a rap group and are rated by most insiders to reach November only by the thickness of their mouth guards.

Frankly, unless a lot of people are terribly wrong, the Bay Area's three Division I teams will be splitting a near-record-low six wins, which when added to the already eroding fan bases at the three schools will mean a lot of alumni cash calls in the very near future.

The signs have been there for a while, though, during big times for each of the programs.

There are, to the schools' thinking, too many pro teams (the estimable journalist and historian Leonard Koppett figures the six major sports play 260-some-odd games per year before a total of 15 million seats in a population base of only 6 million) and too much a pros-only mentality.

This cuts heavily into the audience the collegians would like to draw from, whether they offer cell phones, laptops or sporty convertibles.

There is also the problem the colleges contribute to themselves. By marketing mostly to the converted (grads and current season-ticket holders), they aren't pounding the tambourine to a very large audience, and that base has gotten progressively smaller since the start of the decade.

So maybe cell phones will do it, although many Cal and Stanford season-ticket holders probably already own stock in the company that makes the damned things. Maybe the proposed Freedom Bowl at Candlestick will do it. After all, it has the stamp of approval of our pal, The Hon. Willie (Short Attention Span) Brown, and to paraphrase the old Pillsbury ad, nothin' says lovin' like Willie talkin' enough to heat an oven.

But first, a cautionary note. As college football funnels itself into fewer and fewer big-money bowls, the fringe bowls (like your Freedom Bowl) continue to suffer. Crammed one after the other in the week between Christmas and New Year's so that ESPN can let those X-Games tapes cool a bit, the smaller bowls get less and less notice, and ultimately will bring little of the push that Cal athletic director John Kasser and Stanford AD Ted Leland think it might. Remember, we shop labels, and the Freedom Bowl going against the first week of the NFL playoffs stands remarkably little chance.

Still, it should count for something that Kasser, Leland (and to a lesser extent, San Jose State's Chuck Bell) are trying to save their football programs from the creeping irrelevance that nips at their cuffs, digs up the garden and chews up the morning paper.

The Freedom Bowl doesn't seem at first glance like much of an answer, but it at least shows that the three schools understand the question. That alone puts them ahead of at least three of our pro owners, which is a minor accomplishment.&lt;